Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Essay Topics

Pirsig's 1966 Honda Super Hawk motorcycle
Pirsig'south 1966 Honda Super Militarist motorcycle, featured in his novel Zen and the Fine art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. Jaclyn Nash / NMAH

Reading Robert Pirsig's description of a road trip today, i feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried footstep over two-lane roads and through thunderstorms that take the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the North Dakota plains. They annals the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off. Most shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last fourth dimension you saw that? The travelers' exposure—to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the road—is absorbing to present-24-hour interval readers, especially if they don't ride motorcycles. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of beingness fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality, smoothing its rough edges for our psychic comfort.

If such experiences feel less available to u.s.a. now, Pirsig would not exist surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular manner of moving through the world, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator'southward route trip with his son and two friends equally a journey of inquiry into values, became a massive best seller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modernistic life, governed by neither a reflexive disfavor to technology, nor a naive organized religion in it. At the center of the story is the motorbike itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in America in the 1960s, inaugurating an constant fascination with Japanese blueprint amidst American motorists, and the visitor's founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of "quality" to a quasi-mystical status, coinciding with Pirsig's own efforts in Zen to articulate a "metaphysics of quality." Pirsig's writing conveys his loyalty to this motorcar, a relationship of intendance extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared to British bikes of the same era, the Hondas seemed more refined. (My writing career grew out of these experiences—an attempt to articulate the human element in mechanical work.)

In the first chapter, a disagreement develops betwixt the narrator and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorbike maintenance. Robert performs his ain maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional practice it. This posture of non-involvement, nosotros soon learn, is a crucial element of their countercultural sensibility. They seek escape from "the whole organized flake" or "the system," every bit the couple puts information technology; technology is a expiry force, and the betoken of hitting the road is to leave it behind. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at technology is to "Take information technology somewhere else. Don't have it here." The irony is they still find themselves entangled with The Motorcar—the one they sit on.

Preview thumbnail for 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

A narration of a summer motorbike trip undertaken by a father and his son, the volume becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to alive. The narrator's relationship with his son leads to a powerful self-reckoning; the craft of motorcycle maintenance leads to an austerely cute process for reconciling science, organized religion, and humanism

Today, nosotros often use "technology" to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offering no apparent friction between the cocky and the earth, no need to primary the grubby details of their operation. The industry of our smartphones, the algorithms that guide our digital experiences from the cloud—it all takes place "somewhere else," just as John and Sylvia wished.

However lately nosotros have begun to realize that this very opacity has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Large Tech now orders everyday life more securely than John and Sylvia imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, a road trip to "get away from it all" would depend on GPS, and would prompt digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral data and used to nudge us into assisting channels, likely without our fifty-fifty knowing it.

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A manuscript copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Jaclyn Nash / NMAH

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Tools that Pirsig used for maintaining his bike and other vehicles. Jaclyn Nash / NMAH

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Shop manual for the 1966 Honda Super Militarist. Jaclyn Nash / NMAH

We don't know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, as he refrained from most interviews later on publishing a 2nd novel, Lila, in 1991. But his narrator has left us a way out that can exist reclaimed by anyone venturesome enough to effort it: He patiently attends to his own motorcycle, submits to its quirky mechanical needs and learns to understand information technology. His way of living with machines doesn't rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to go our hands dirty, to exist self-reliant. In Zen, we see a man maintaining straight engagement with the world of material objects, and with it some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.

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Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/robert-pirsig-zen-art-motorcycle-maintenance-resonates-today-180975768/

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